Background documentation FORMATTED Locate the document in its SAP Library structure

FORMATTED (FWV, Fixed Width, Columnar Values) is a possible format of a data stream. As this format is not the default value of the SAP DB Loader, it must be explicitly specified in a load or unload command.

The FORMATTED format can only be used for source data streams in plain text. Data streams with binary values must be loaded with the FORMATTED BINARY format.

Example

customer.data

Position no.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 .....
 

0 1 m i l l e r – 1 0 2 7 7 N e w   Y o r k - - -
0 2 s m i t h - 6 0 6 7 8 C h i c a g o - - - - -
0 3 k l e i n e r t 3 3 1 8 4 M i a m I - - - - -

The data fields have a uniform format.

FASTLOAD command:

FASTLOAD TABLE customer
  cno       01-02
  name   03-10
  zip       11-15
  location  16-27
INFILE 'customer.data' FORMATTED

Data Lines

A data line in a data stream corresponds to a data record that you want to load or unload.

All data lines have the same fixed length. Each line in the data stream contains the individual data fields at the same position with a fixed length. Each data line ends with a line break.

Data Fields

The assignment between data fields in the data stream and the table columns is made using the position specification in a command for loading or unloading data.

Position Specification

The data fields in the data stream are described using their byte start and end position. The first possible byte start position is 1. Specifying an end position is optional. If no end position is specified for a data field, it has a length of 1.

The assignment between the data fields in the data stream and table columns can be made in any order. The order does not affect the processing speed.

The positions do not need to follow each other directly when you load or unload data. When it unloads data, the SAP DB Loader fills any gaps with blank characters.